Tuesday, 20 August 2013

#1: Star Rider

STAR RIDER

Carole Carreck

Reviewed by Mark Lain

The first
release in the short-lived Starlight
series of adventures aimed at a female market epitomises why these gamebooks
never took off. From the outset, this book is patronising, turgid, and
distinctly trapped in a mid-80s world of wealth, materialism and shallowness. The
opening section reminds YOU umpteen times that you have no money and that you have
struggled to get the cash together to buy the object of your dreams (a horse)
so that you can pursue your equestrian ambitions.

To be fair,
if the introductory section doesn’t totally put you off bothering to play the
book, the initial act (finding a stable, training yourself and your horse ready
for the Badminton trials) is fairly interesting and you do get a feeling of
your character quickly developing as a rider. Sadly, once competitiveness and
the lure of mysterious and quiet rich men kicks in, the story becomes boring,
repetitive, and, all of a sudden ends, as if Carreck either ran out of ideas or
realised this was a no-hoper and just decided to conclude it before it became
unbearable!

In actual
fact, plot-wise (ignoring the jarring switch in tone and abrupt ending), this
gamebook could have been a real winner for anyone interested in horses and there
is a sense of quite savvy marketing in the selection of subject matter, plus
the fact that it all flows logically, even if your meteoric rise from an
upstart newbie to a member of the Olympic team very quickly may be a little
far-fetched, especially as you seem to have very little control over your horse
during the trials section and seem to rely on luck to get by. I know nothing
about equestrian culture, but Carreck quite evidently knows a fair bit about it and you are nicely submerged
in a world of horses, jealousy, and competition which is probably quite realistic.
The language used does include some specialist terms and situations, but you
don’t necessarily feel lost when reading this book as it merges into the text
neatly and it does not present everything as if it was jargon in the way that
some of the more annoyingly “knowing” series entries would - Starlight #4 Danger On The Air is a
nightmare for knowingly using speech marks around any vocabulary even vaguely
industry-specific, for example.

The jump-cutting structure of the storyline is a good thing in that it avoids boring episodes of
training, but there is a missed opportunity here to allow your character to
gain experience and develop skills specific to the theme. There are no stats of
any kind to illustrate your character’s strengths and weaknesses, and some kind
of Experience marker would have added considerably to your involvement with
your character, especially as it would give you an indication and expectation
of how easy or hard (or even likely) your success would be. As it stands, you
just seem to jump from being no-one to becoming someone in a totally
unrealistic manner. To compound this issue, the crucial later stages of the
story when you are in trials rely purely on you choosing the right paragraph in
a series of 50/50 situations. No actual character ability comes into the
equation, neither even does the element of chance that dice rolling would give –
your success is based purely on picking the right section. In a world as specific
as a sporting event, skill and development influence any chance of success, so
there is no realism here at all, which is a shame given the otherwise generally
logical progression of the plot.

Further to
the lack of any kind of character prowess coming into play, this book is ridiculously
easy to beat. There are numerous endings to add a small amount of variety, but even
the desired outcome of getting to the Olympics appears on at least four
different paragraphs and, assuming you don’t either make an insane choice such
as getting drunk the night before a major trial, half-killing your horse, or wrongly
deciding who to ally yourself to early on, or get unlucky in the 50/50
situations, once you reach a certain point you cannot fail to win. Pardon the
pun, but the usual gamebook end challenge that can cause you to fall at the
final hurdle is all but absent, making this is a largely unrewarding affair and
there is certainly no feeling of achievement when you beat it.

The lack of
any kind of stats to give you an image of your character and make YOU feel
more real is part of a major failing of this book in that there are no rules at
all – no dice, no element of chance of any kind... you just get straight on
with it. By contrast to your character’s one-dimensional nature, the NPCs are
actually quite fleshed-out making you feel even more alien. The characterisations
are all stereotypes to the point of being hackneyed (the mysterious quiet rich
bloke, the nasty she-devil love rival, the Mr Nice Guy secondary male, the scheming
no-good person, the slightly manic and over-the-top best friend, etc etc) but
at least you can picture them and understand their roles easily, whereas YOU
just seem to be gliding through the proceedings trying to become a success,
which makes the ease of winning all the more incomprehensible.

One saving grace
of this book over the majority of the Starlight
books that would follow it is that you are not rail-roaded into getting
romantically involved with at least one of the male NPCs. You can control your
destiny in this respect, even if the romance aspect is played down in this book
by comparison with the other five. There is also a noticeable maturity in the character
you play. In traditional role-play books (at least, in those where age is not explicitly
specified) it is almost always assumed that you are of an indefinite but
obviously adult and experienced (in terms of adventuring) age. In Star Rider you can get served in pubs so
are assumed to be over 18, there is an outcome where you decide to get married,
plus one of your initial decisions is where to live so you must have left home.
All this clearly sets your character up as being a young adult. As a
counterpoint, the relative simplicity (in difficulty terms) of this book and
its overall feeling of being fairly facile, suggests a target audience of pre-pubescents
or, if not, then early teenagers with absolutely no sense of irony!

The internal
art here is by Peter Wilkes who illustrated three of the six books in this series.
His work is sketchy and lacks depth in terms of background (although his
shading is nicely done), not that you’d really notice as the bulk of the
drawings are of horses doing various things, inter-mingled with the occasional
picture of someone staring doe-eyed at you. In a book where the subject is
horses, you could anticipate some horsey imagery, but the illustrations here do
labour the point a bit. The cover by Steve Jones (presumably not the one out of
the Sex Pistols?) is frankly appalling and really does not give you any
incentive to open the book with its combination of a collage of heads, some
fields, a flashy car, a horse, and some drugs, all in bizarre soft pastel
colours. Starlight books are known
for having poor covers, but this one is easily the worst of the lot.

Other than a (largely)
logical plot and a non-intrusive approach to a specialised subject matter, this
book is, for the most part, a condescending and uninspiring experience. In the
highly unlikely event that you don’t beat it on the first playthrough, there is
little here to encourage repeat plays other than if you are totally obsessed
with horses (which may be what Puffin’s marketing people were hoping for,
incidentally!) As a story for non-demanding children it could work, but as a game
it has little to recommend, especially as many of the sections just tell you to
turn to another section, rather than offering you many actual choices so you do
often feel that you have little control over anything other than the major
decisions, plus whether to fall in love or not, ultimately giving the feeling that you are reading a below-par children's book rather than playing a gamebook.